The DRM on DVDs, while obviously long ago cracked wide open, still carries the legal implications of DRM.

> Music industry already dumped DRM for good.

This is the part that really gets to me. The music industry is still largely dominated by the sort of companies that also dominate video, and music files are vastly easier to trade around due to their siz, and yet DRM in music is nearly completely nonexistent these days. The only difference, as far as I can tell, is that these same companies just think they can continue to get away with it for video.

Really the proper course of action is to give them reason to reconsider that.

Video costs many times more to produce, and is generally consumed only once.

Music is cheap to make and people tend to listen many times over, making the try-it-and-purchase-it model a genuine possibility that video doesn't really have.

Good films have a solid replay value, i.e. you keep them in your collection to return to them later, the same way as you reread good books. And even if you view something only once, it doesn't really make DRM any more sensible than it is for something that you reuse multiple times.

For example games are hard to produce (and it usually takes a long time). Still you can get very good games DRM free, because in gaming the faults of DRM are especially apparent.

The downside of DRM - it insults paying customers, it lowers the usability of the content (restricting it to selected devices / players etc.), it also doesn't affect pirates, since the moment that DRM is broken by some skillful crackers - DRM free copies are widely distributed.

So let's see - no one benefits from DRM. Who is in downside? Paying users. So what is the point in using it anywhere?

With music, they had a limited choices: 1) Keep DRM and deal with Apple but lose the non-Apple market; 2) Deal with a bunch of other DRM formats that don't work with iPods; or 3) dump DRM and be able to sell to everyone (with a side strategy of suing downloaders). For video, there is no dominate hardware manufacture that has a proprietary DRM format -- almost everyone that sells uses a software player of their own design. Ebooks are the one case I don't understand though.

It takes one player to break the trend and to demonstrate the benefits of DRM free distribution. So let's see if that will happen with video.

Someone should make a good service (site?) which will list DRM free distributors for various media where DRM is still present in general.

I think it's mostly about practical implications, rather than legal ones. Legal battle is about those who push some junk in the law vs those who attempt to repeal DMCA/1201 and etc (and that can take quite a long time to achieve). But practical battle goes about simply adding more DRM everywhere vs getting rid of it.

Companies of the RIAA/MPAA style don't operate with common sense and pure logic. Practice demonstrated it multiple times. They are driven by random impulses like paranoia, lust for control and so on. So don't expect them to give you a logical answer why they don't use DRM in music, but use it in video.